


A Pox on Hope

by spqr



Series: ladies!! [4]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, F/M, FBI Agent Stiles Stilinski, Female Stiles Stilinski, Fluff, Future Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Serial Killers, Sharing Clothes, Sharing a Bed, Sick Stiles Stilinski, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:35:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,764
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24727600
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spqr/pseuds/spqr
Summary: Stiles knocks her skull back against the headrest, so damn tired she can’t do anything but make a frustrated noise in the back of her throat. “Why is it always a weird sex thing?”
Relationships: Peter Hale/Stiles Stilinski
Series: ladies!! [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1733536
Comments: 11
Kudos: 353





	A Pox on Hope

**Author's Note:**

> dear god i am writing teen wolf fan fiction in the year of our lord 2020 send help

The first thing Stiles asks for once she’s installed in the shoebox police station in bumfuck Montana is a sprite and a cheeseburger.

There’s only one officer left with her—a doe-eyed woman who looks like she’s been on the job for exactly three hours. The other two deputies and the sheriff are still out “securing the scene” at the gas station where Stiles broke a window with her elbow and helped herself to the phone, and Stiles can tell that her watcher doesn’t really want to leave her alone to make the no-doubt significant trip to the closest fast food joint, but it’s going to be at least three hours until the cavalry can get here from the field office in Salt Lake City, and Stiles is starving so she convinces the officer that she can just take Stiles with her. She uses her FBI special agent status to shore up her argument, which is probably unfair of her, but the last ten years or so of facing off against wildly overpowered supernatural creatures has taught her that cheating is okay.

The officer—whose name turns out to be Fawn, and isn’t that just perfect—is wound tight as a spring the whole thirty-minute drive to Dairy Queen. Stiles starts off trying to talk to her, but when all she gets is high-pitched nervous laughter, she cranks the radio instead, “Change” by The Lightning Seeds, which makes her think of _Clueless,_ which suddenly makes her feel a lot younger than twenty-five, which she figures she can’t really blame herself for considering she just escaped some psycho killer’s murder cabin by prying up the floorboards with her fingernails.

She’s pretty sure the guy is a vampire, and she’s pretty sure the bite throbbing on the side of her waist is going to end up being a problem later, but right now her most pressing issue is deciding what kind of Blizzard she wants. “Wonder Woman Cookie Collision,” Fawn says, when she asks for recommendations, so Stiles turns back to the cashier, who still has pimples and braces and who looks alarmed at how much blood is oozing through the University of Montana t-shirt Stiles filched from the station locker room, and orders a large sprite, a double cheeseburger, and a Wonder Woman Cookie Collision.

Later, she’ll realize that her fixation on food in the immediate aftermath of a major trauma is probably more of a coping mechanism than a factor of how hungry she is; she hasn’t even been missing twenty-four hours, so it’s not like she’s totally starved. But the prospect of sitting in the single interview room in the station with nothing to do but wait is way too nerve wracking to even look at head-on. She’s much happier digging chunks of cookie dough out of her blizzard with that dumb red straw-spoon, trying to wheedle Officer Fawn into handing over her cell phone and waiting for the circus to descend like a swarm of DNA-hungry piranhas.

When they finally do arrive, Stiles is glad for the insular safety of the interview room, with its ugly upholstered chairs like they used to put in doctor’s waiting rooms in the nineties. It’s like being on base during a game of tag. She can hear the noise of a major jurisdictional shift happening like an earthquake outside, poor Fawn squeaking out the potential locations of things that bumfuck Montana probably doesn’t have, like “5G hubs” and “property maps” and “tactical support.” Stiles recognizes the voices of Special Agent Harris, her boss at Vi-CAP, and Special Agent O’Donnell, the infuriatingly thick Scully to Stiles’s Mulder. She watches the dark parking lot around the edges of the window; the glass has been fogged out, but just with those privacy stickers you can buy at home improvement stores, leaving clear slivers where she can see the mobile operations center being set up where a few minutes ago there was only Fawn’s black and white.

After a while, the door opens. Harris and O’Donnell come in and help themselves to the seats across the table from Stiles.

“Tell us what happened,” Harris says. His voice sounds flat and uninterested, but it’s almost reassuring; he always comes across like he’s asking someone at CVS where he can find the toothpaste, no matter if he’s interviewing a parking attendant who might’ve seen the right license plate or a serial rapist who likes to bite women’s toes off and swallows them whole. “In your own time,” Harris adds, a few seconds late, and Stiles would be thankful if she didn’t have so much experience keeping her head together through this sort of thing.

“Well,” she starts, slowly. “Special Agent O’Donnell left her flask of holy water in the car.”

“Jesus Christ,” O’Donnell hisses. “Are you seriously blaming me for this?”

“You _shot_ at a suspected _vampire_ with fucking _bullets!”_ Stiles snaps. She feels like a kindergarten teacher trying to impress upon her students the fundamental concept of “don’t pick your nose.” Really, for the FBI, these people are goddamn remedial. “That’s like, day one shit.”

O’Donnell turns bright red, and then sort of purple, and then starts spluttering at Harris that he can’t _actually_ believe this crap about vampires, really, Special Agent Stilinski should be in a mental ward, not running around with a badge and a gun—so what if the guy had newspaper over his windows _and_ blackout shades _and_ worked at a blood bank, some people were just weird, and anyway how did Stiles get away so quickly anyways? what if she was in on it all along? to which Stiles drops her head on the table and says, “Fuck, O’Donnell, you’re stupid. What do I stand to gain from _staging my own kidnapping?”_

“Wait outside,” Harris orders O’Donnell neatly, before she can come up with a retort.

O’Donnell shoves her chair back and stomps out of the interview room in a method very unbecoming of a special agent, but Stiles doubts she would’ve been able to come up with anything good, anyways. She’s the worst sort of Scully—doesn’t believe the truth even when it’s staring her in the face. Ever since they got partnered up, Stiles has sort of wanted to call Scott to come wolf out in front of her just to see how she manages to “logic” her way out of that one. She wishes she could call Scott now, but they haven’t talked in months, and anyway everything in Beacon Hills seems to be sunshine and babies for the first time in as long as she can remember; she doesn’t want to ruin it with a two-a.m. phone call that goes, _Hey, Scotty, I know you’re pretty busy with your four-year-old and your pregnant wife, but can you come to Montana? I think I might be a vampire now._

“We’ll do the full interview once you’ve had a good night’s sleep,” Harris tells her. “For now, we followed your trail back to the cabin—good thinking, tearing your shirt up—and it looks like the cabin’s empty. We sent some techs in quick to swab for DNA, but we want to watch it from a distance in case he comes back. He might. He probably wasn’t planning on leaving you alive. Unless there’s anything you can think of that might help us locate him, we’ll get you swabbed, scrape under your nails, and set you up with a motel room.”

“Get me a state map,” Stiles says, after a minute.

There’s a question in Harris’s eyes, but he doesn’t voice it, just gets up and goes to the door. Stiles hears voices, Harris sending some gopher digging through the police station, and then Harris comes back inside with a map of Montana. Stiles spreads it out on the interview table, shuffling her two empty cups and her cheeseburger wrapper (full of cold pickles) onto the floor, then makes a silent gesture for Harris’ pen. He gives it to her. She scrutinizes the map for another moment, then outlines the local pack territory to the best of her memory.

Harris watches her work without butting in. That’s the best thing about Harris, as a boss—he recognizes when his people know more about something than he does, and doesn’t let it bother him. No one else in Vi-CAP, in the entire Bureau really, has the same level of experience as Stiles does with things that go bump in the night. She finishes outlining, then finds a clean square of paper and writes two names from memory. “These are local werewolf packs.” She hands Harris back his pen. “If he tries to hide out in either of their territories, the alphas will know he’s there, and they’ll know how to find him. I can’t promise they’ll want to help us, but…”

“That’s good.” Harris folds up the map. “It’s somewhere to start, at least.”

“Don’t bring O’Donnell,” Stiles warns him. “Don’t bring anyone who’s going to be disrespectful, or you won’t get anything out of them. Ask for their assistance, not their cooperation.”

“Got it,” Harris says, standing. “Get some sleep, Stilinski. I’m going to need you in the morning.”

Fawn continues to be stingy with her electronics even while she’s driving Stiles to the only motel in town, the Blue Mountain View, so it’s not until Stiles has taken a scorchingly-hot shower, spent a half hour prodding at her still-bleeding bite wound in the mirror, decided on a big band aid, and pulled open the plastic-wrapped packet of FBI sweats that she sits down by the phone in the room and debates who to call.

She made herself memorize a lot of numbers in high school because she kept losing her phone on death-defying midnight dashes in the woods, so in theory she has a lot of options, but Lydia’s a PhD candidate at Stanford, Scott’s got Kira and little Ally, who’s at that phase where she tries to eat mud every time he turns around, and Derek’s on a year long road trip with Isaac in the wilds of Canada, so the most Stiles ever hears from him is a weekly email from the account she set up for him in senior year (sourwolf@hotmail.com) letting his packmates know he’s still kicking. Usually it just says “alive,” but sometimes there’s a picture of Isaac giving a thumbs-up under a sign welcoming them to a town no one’s ever heard of. Stiles knows each and every one of them would drop what they were doing if she asked, but the point is that she doesn’t want to have to ask. She doesn’t want to ruin their peace.

So instead, she calls someone she hasn’t spoken to in almost a year.

“ _What_ ,” Peter answers on the fifth ring, sounding mostly asleep. “ _Whoever you are, you better have a good reason for calling me at four in the fucking morning._ ”

“It’s me,” Stiles says, trusting he’ll know her voice. “What do you know about vampires?”

There’s a long pause. _“Stiles?”_

“Yeah, it’s me,” Stiles repeats, impatient. “Seriously, Peter, I’m in a tight spot here. Vampires.“

_“There’s not much about the supernatural that I know that you don’t,”_ Peter answers, which is exactly what Stiles didn’t want to hear. _“They drink blood. They bite. If the bacteria in their mouth gets into your bloodstream, it will turn you. Kill you, bring you back. Sometimes it takes, sometimes it doesn’t, just like wolves.”_

Stiles is quiet for a long minute, panicking internally. She does all her panicking internally these days—it’s easier than having to explain to an FBI shrink that she has to stay in the field, she can’t go on mental leave, because there’s literally no one else qualified to do her job. Her hair is still wet from the shower, dripping on the damp shoulders of her FBI sweatshirt, her nails are torn ragged, the beds bruised dark purple, almost black; she pulls a splinter out from under her thumbnail, wincing. She’s not sure if she feels any different than she’d normally feel after being awake and scared shitless for twenty-four hours straight—if it feels like there’s vampire bacteria in her blood, changing her on a fundamental level. She has no idea.

“ _Stiles?”_ Peter asks, when she’s been silent for too long. _“What kind of tight spot are you in?”_

Stiles considers hanging up without telling him. She can probably handle it on her own. Worst comes to worst, she can shut herself up in her motel room until she either dies or turns, and then figure out whether it’s feasable to be an FBI agent and a vampire at the same time, which, Jesus, sounds like the plot of a bad self-published erotic novel. But that really doesn’t seem like fun, and anyway, even though Peter’s had a weird obsessive thing for her since she was like sixteen, he’s also the one person she could always call when she was in over her head, who’d show up and help her fix things even if he wasn’t technically pack. As a teenager, she was the fixer, but Peter was the fixer’s fixer. If anyone can help her right now, it’s not her blind mice coworkers, it’s him.

“I might’ve got bitten,” she says, then immediately amends, “I definitely got bitten. Like, really definitely.”

The dead air over the phone goes somehow tense. _“Where are you?”_

“Montana,” Stiles says. “I think the town’s called Durbin.”

“ _How do you not know what the town’s called?”_ Peter asks, short and exasperated, but Stiles can hear him getting out of bed, the vague shuffling of bedsheets and clothes and curtains.

“I came here in the trunk of a car, Peter, I wasn’t exactly looking for landmarks.”

The shuffling stops. _“You_ what? _Stiles—“_

“I’m in the Blue Mountain View motel, room 18,” Stiles cuts in, before he can get going on a rant about her talent for getting abducted. “The whole county is swarming with FBI agents, so don’t kill anyone on your way here. Oh, and bring me some clothes, because mine are evidence. Thanks, bye.”

She hangs up. The phone starts ringing a second later, but she doesn’t answer it. If it’s Peter calling back, she doesn’t want to keep torturing herself with the familiar sound of his voice while she can’t actually touch him; it’s like she’s almost a wolf, the way she feels about her pack and touch. If it’s Harris, and it’s urgent, she figures he can call Fawn and tell her to knock on the door.

Whoever it is doesn’t try to call again. Stiles peels down the comforter—she’s well versed in the sorts of stains that exist on in this caliber of establishment—and lays down without turning the light off. She always sleeps with the light on, these days; there are too many things out there that have better night vision than she does, and unless there’s a wolf in the house she doesn’t like to take any chances. But even with the light on, she can’t seem to convince her heart it’s not in danger.

The motel door seems ridiculously flimsy, like it could blow open in a stiff breeze, and beyond it Stiles can feel the vast, black snarl of the Montana night. Anything could be out there, hunting, lurking in the woods. The psycho who kept Stiles tied to a bed for hours, blood pouring from the bite in her side, scratching around in the dark at the footboard—he could be out there. He could find her here, and there’s nothing Fawn or the FBI could do about it. Stiles turns on the TV, finds a rerun of a baseball game from earlier in the year, Colorado Rockies vs. San Diego Padres, turns the sound down, and lets the white noise of the local announcers calm her down enough to fall into a shallow, fitful sleep.

There are ghosts in the strange fever yellow light of the lamp, but the next thing Stiles is fully aware of is a knock on the door. It sounds like it’s right in her ear, loud enough to send her vision and her stomach reeling, and it’s not until she comes back into herself, staring at the green diode clock on the bedside table that reads 08:00 AM, that she realizes she feels like total and complete shit. Like, Nogitsune-level shit.

But the good thing about having a label for how preternaturally shitty she feels is that Stiles has a good sense of how far she can push herself before she breaks her mind or her body or both. And right now, with four-ish hours of passable sleep under her belt and something that smells suspiciously like actual, good coffee on the other side of the door, she’s nowhere near her breaking point.

The knocking comes again, louder. “Stilinski!” shouts O’Donnell. “Open the fuck up!”

Okay, maybe she’s a little bit closer to her breaking point than she thought. She drags herself out of bed and flings open the door just so she can glare at O’Donnell face to face; the dumbass Scully wannabe, because she’s hateful, doesn’t even seem intimidated at all. “You look like shit,” she informs Stiles.

Stiles glares harder. “Yeah. Thanks.”

“Here.” O’Donnell shoves a coffee carrier at her chest. There are two cups, both marked “S” in Sharpie; they might not get along, but her partner at least knows how to make Stiles’s brain work before ten. “CSU found more bodies in the woods,” O’Donnell says. “Harris wants you to look at the scene ASAP.”

Stiles looks down at her feet, in navy tube socks. “I don’t have shoes.”

“I’ll get you shoes.”

“Where are you gonna find shoes? I had to drive thirty minutes for a burger.”

“I’ll find shoes, Stilinski. Be ready in five.”

If O’Donnell manages to find a shoe store in five minutes, Stiles will eat her fucking FBI standard-issue hat, but she’s at least glad to be alone for a while longer while she wakes herself up. Her technique, perfected over years of seven a.m. wake-up calls post five a.m. falling face first into her pillow bedtimes, mostly involves splashing cold water on her face, chugging the first cup of coffee, meeting her own eyes in the mirror and telling herself to get the fuck up because sleep is for pussies. The effect is sort of undercut this morning by the almost sickly blue-red rings under her eyes, and the fact that her shoulder length hair looks like birds nested in it over night, but she does her best to comb her bangs back into their rightful place with her fingers and presses a cold washcloth to the rings, and the result might not be all that impressive but at least she doesn’t look so much like a cokehead who mugged a federal agent for his gym clothes.

Miracle of miracles, O’Donnell actually _does_ come back with a pair of shoes—hiking boots two sizes too big, but shoes nonetheless. Stiles grabs her second cup of coffee like a cross between a security blanket and a shield, and for once in their partnership doesn’t argue about who gets to drive. She’s pretty sure if she drove she’d mix up left and right and take a sharp turn off a cliff, which doesn’t speak well to her current investigative abilities, but oh well. She might be metamorphasizing, so she figures operating at 50% capacity is good enough. The sun, at least, doesn’t seem like it’s hurting her; not any more than the sun usually hurts her after a late night. She goes digging around in O’Donnell’s stuff looking for the extra pair of mirrored aviators the crazy bitch always travels with, and she must look pathetic while she’s doing it because O’Donnell actually takes pity, pulls them out of the driver’s side door, and lets Stiles have them. Stiles doesn’t thank her, since this whole thing is still technically her fault, but she doesn’t curse her out for a while either, which is basically the same.

The crime scene is a shitshow. Every deputy and state trooper in a hundred mile radius must be here in Durbin, combing the forest with metal detectors and K-9 units. At the epicenter of it all is a huge white weather-proof tent swarming with crime scene techs and agents from at least three field offices; there’s a station set up outside the flap for people entering to put on shoe covers and gloves and people exiting to peel them off, and Harris is standing off to the side, face in his hand, looking like someone just told him he has to serve jury duty on a tax evasion case for the next twenty years.

When he sees Stiles stumbling up the hill, the blast doors slam up and it’s back to business. “Stilinski. I hope you got all the sleep you need for a while. It looks like we have ourselves a serial.”

Stiles doesn’t tell him she dealt with her first serial killer in high school. It’s not cool to brag.

Harris clears the tent and brings Stiles in alone. She’d be flattered, except that she knows it’s because he doesn’t want anyone else to hear what she has to say. He acknowledges her usefulness in solving cases, acknowledges that there might be monsters out there who don’t officially exist and that Stiles is, on occasion, his best chance of catching them, but he doesn’t acknowledge it out loud. They have a routine of fudging paperwork so phrases like “the killer was a werewolf” show up as “the killer had a particular affinity with the moon”; it doesn’t help anyone to try and force the higher-ups into admitting the existence of things they don’t even want to look at directly, and it doesn’t help to have the peons in CSU spreading nasty rumors about the head of Vi-CAP going off the deep end. So on cases like these, Stiles and Harris go in alone.

It’s a gruesome scene. According to chatter Stiles heard on the way up the hill from the trail where the cars are parked, K-9 units sniffed it out at about six this morning, after which specialized units were brought in to dig up the fresh earth of recently-dug graves. They’ve found eight bodies so far, some still in the early stages of decomposition, some older, gone to mudstained bones; the newest still has almost all of her skin, even though it’s yellowed, waxy, and run through with maggots. Stiles has seen a lot, but usually the sort of dead bodies she deals with are more bloody, like slasher films instead of real life. These are worse. The newest body still has pale blonde eyelashes, spotted with fine particles of dirt. The oldest has a small sapphire engagement ring on her skeletal left ring finger. Harris starts to ask something, but Stiles says, “Give me a minute,” hands him her coffee, and climbs carefully down in the shallow grave with the newest victim.

The woman has a bite mark on the right side of her waist, exactly where Stiles’s is. Stiles feels her own wound throb in sympathy, and shoves the nausea down forcibly. If she acts like a victim now, the only thing she’s ever going to be in the eyes of her boss or the FBI is a female agent who got kidnapped by a serial killer, and she doesn’t want that. She wants respect, so she steadies her hands and uses her latex thumb to peel the woman’s upper lip carefully away from her teeth, unsurprised when she finds two razor-sharp fangs.

“He’s turning them,” she says to Harris, “and then he’s killing them.”

“You said something before about the bite not… _taking_. Couldn’t this be that?”

Stiles shakes her head and climbs up out of the hole with a hand from Harris. “They have fangs. If it hadn’t taken, they wouldn’t. The CSU guys are gonna find some other cause of death. Drugs, maybe.”

“Why would the perp do that?” Harris asks. “Why go to the trouble of turning them, just to kill them?”

Stiles shrugs, but it’s mostly for show. Shrugging is something normal people do when asked to think like a serial murderer; it shows an acceptable degree of bewilderment. “Best guess? He wants his victims to be vampires, but he knows if he takes any that are already turned, their colony is going to take an interest. This guy will be a loner, same profile as a human killer. He won’t have people to back him up. He can’t afford to start a war.”

“So, he preys on people with no connection to his world.” The _supernatural_ world, Stiles hears. “And he’s doing it in a sliver of no-man’s-land between two huge pack territories. Smart.”

“Sure,” Stiles agrees. “But if he wanted to stay under the radar, he shouldn’t have grabbed me.”

Because she’s technically not allowed to work the case anymore, being so intimately involved, Harris makes a big show of having Fawn drive her back to the Blue Mountain View motel. She goes back with a new laptop and a new cell phone, though, and instructions from Harris not to put it on silent, since they’re going to need her. To a degree, this can be worked like a straight serial case—canvas the few remote hunting cabins around where Stiles was held, run extensive forensics on the killer’s cabin and the burial ground, show the pencil rendering of the killer’s face Stiles worked out over webcam with their sketch artist around at the general store and the gas station and the hunting shop. But there are clues in evidence that a vanilla human agent isn’t going to be able to read, that not even Harris is going to understand, and that’s where Stiles comes in.

She sweet talks Fawn into getting food again on the way back—Fawn won’t go all the way back to Dairy Queen, but there’s a deli in town that’s open during daylight hours, so they swing through and grab a small feast: potato chips, pasta salad, and a few hoagies. Seven, to be exact, because Stiles has a feeling that when they get back to the motel there’s going to be a grumpy, hungry werewolf for her to feed.

And indeed there is. Peter’s leaning on the hood of a rental sedan parked in front of room 18, a duffel bag at his feet and the collar of his ostentatious black leather trench turned up against a nonexistent wind. Something quiets in Stiles at the sight of him. It’s the same phenomenon that always occurs when she steps foot in Beacon Hills for the first time in a while and lays eyes on Scott or her dad or even fucking _Jackson_ ; like a bird trapped in her ribcage has finally been let out—only she didn’t realize it was there until it was gone, because she’d gotten used to having it around. It’s almost orgasmic, the amount of relief she feels not to be on her own anymore, and she thinks, even through the winshield of Fawn’s cruiser, Peter must read some of that on her face, because the tight crow’s feet around his eyes suddenly go smooth and soft.

“Who’s that?” Fawn asks, pulling into a parking spot on the far side of the lot.

“A consultant,” Stiles says, and leaves it at that. She’s a special agent; she’s allowed to be mysterious.

She’s juggling her bag of hoagies, her large sprite and her new electronics, which leaves no hand free to grab her key as she makes it to the door, but Peter just reaches into her sweatpants pocket without asking and comes up with her room key. Stiles can feel Fawn’s eyes on her from the parked black and white, until she follows Peter into the room and he closes the door wordlessly behind her. She dumps her armload on the unmade bed and goes to draw the curtains. It probably looks suspicious, but whatever she and Peter are about to get up to vis-a-vy her still-oozing vampire bite would definitely look worse, so if Fawn wants to think they’re fucking then that’s fine; it will serve as a nice convenient red herring.

“Stiles,” she realizes Peter has been saying, the whole time she’s been yanking at the corner of the curtain that’s stuck behind the window-mounted AC unit. “ _Stiles_.” His hands come down gently on her shoulders, and she goes abruptly still, her back to him.

She’s thinking about that wet earth, rich and dark and interspersed with slimy pink worms. She’s remembering it pressed deep into the crease between that woman’s thigh and crotch, thick on her teeth when she peeled back her lip. She’s imagining the cold stickiness of it in her own throat; she’s thinking about how Harris’s crime scene grubs had very nearly found nine bodies in the woods, instead of eight. It’s not a new feeling, this sense that she had a near miss with an early grave, but it’s been a while since Stiles has been _observed_ while she’s feeling it. She feels herself lean back without deciding to do so, turning her weight over to Peter for a half a second before she remembers where she is and who she is and that she isn’t sixteen anymore.

“Right,” she clears her throat and steps away, out of Peter’s orbit. “Tell me how we can keep me from turning into a mindless, bloodthirsty creature of the night.”

Peter waits a minute before answering, which tells Stiles everything she needs to know before he even speaks. “I don’t think we can. I called Deaton before I got on the plane, and it seems like, if a vampire doesn’t drain you—if it only bites you—you’re either going to turn, or you’re going to die.”

Stiles toes off her boots, kicks them under the bed, and says, “That’s fucking typical.”

Then she sits down at the sticky table and unwraps a hoagie, because it doesn’t seem like there’s a whole lot else to do and she’s starving. Peter keeps standing at the window for a moment, watching her pick sweet peppers drenched in mayo off her sandwich like he’s remembering how much of an insane person she is in real time, the fondly-disgusted look on his face clashing atrociously with the byronic melodrama of his coat.

“I’m not sure what you want me to do, here,” he says.

Stiles isn’t really sure either. Well, she has an idea what she wants from him, but it’s not really something that’s terribly becoming of a real grown-up FBI agent, so she doesn’t really want to say it. But then Peter says her name again, for what must be the millionth time since he got here, and she answers him automatically. “Stay. Just, can you stay here and not be a bitch about it and make sure I don’t die. Please.”

“Stiles—“

“Everyone else here is a fucking idiot, except maybe my boss, and I’m not sure I can catch a serial killer and deal with turning into a vampire at the same time. Okay?”

Peter stares at her with an unreadable expression for another moment, then helps himself to the other seat at the table and one of the hoagies. Stiles figures that’s as good an agreement as she’s going to get, but then he’s scraping all the vegetables off his salami with a plastic fork, being oddly fastidious about it, and he says, “All you ever have to do is ask, you know that. You’re pack. I’ve just gotten used to…”

“Being on your own?” Stiles guesses. “Yeah. Me too.”

Peter doesn’t smile; he’s not really a smiler, unless he’s got blood on his teeth and wants to show it off. But the look he gives her is somehow heavier than the ones before, more contented, as if just this small moment of understanding has catapulted them back to the same place they were when she was in high school, when they spent every night hunting monsters in the woods, building the sort of unbreakable trust that’s forged in fire.

Stiles doesn’t know how many times she’s sat on a counter and let Peter patch her up, his warm palm pressed to her stomach to steady her, her arms braced over his shoulders while he wrapped gauze around her battered ribs, Stiles babbling mindlessly and letting all the adrenaline go out of her with the assurances of his touch. Whenever things got really bad, really dark, Peter was always her lodestone; it was always the two of them left to clean up the bodies, whenever the rest of the pack got done playing hero. Stiles has never really talked to anyone about it, and she probably never will, but there’s something between her and Peter that’s got nothing to do with the rest of the pack, Hale or McCall or otherwise. They’re an independent unit.

“I’ve been away for so long,” Stiles starts to say, a wad of half-chewed sandwich stuck in her cheek, “I wasn’t sure if, I mean, anymore—“ and it’s then that her shiny new Bureau phone rings.

For maybe the first time in Stiles’s career, canvassing has actually turned something up—a hunter on his way back down the mountain with a pronghorn in the bed of his truck saw someone matching their UNSUB sketch in a general store thirty miles or so out of town. Stiles stays on the phone with Harris for long enough that Peter finishes his hoagie and starts pacing the motel room like a caged wolf, shooting her increasingly alarmed looks as he hears both sides of her conversation. She and Harris agree that their guy is probably looking for a new base of operations; their ploy of sticking people in the woods probably didn’t work, given that their target’s a vampire with superntural hearing and vision and the agents they sent to sit on him are mostly idiots. Given the location of the general store, it seems like he might be branching out dangerously close to pack territory, so Stiles agrees to go talk to the alpha, a woman named Chastity Gather.

When she hangs up, Peter says, “You weren’t sure if what, anymore?”

Stiles sighs and goes to open his duffel bag. “We have to go talk to the Gather pack. Do you know them?”

“I don’t know anyone in Montana,” Peter answers, like she’s asked a stupid question. “But they might have known my sister. Every pack in the country seems to have known my sister.”

“Peter.” Stiles gives up rummaging through his bag, miffed. “These are all your clothes.”

“I brought you a belt.” Peter pulls it out of an interior pocket, a bright red monstrosity of a ring belt that looks like it should only be worn by dads who feel the need to tuck their shirts in to go out and mow the lawn. “It’s not as if I keep women’s clothes around—unless you count discarded lingerie.”

Stiles rolls her eyes heavenward and goes to get changed. Peter has, at least, brought her an undershirt and a pair of boxers, which is good because the standard-issue FBI sweatsuit pack doesn’t come with a bra and panties, and she doesn’t exactly like to conduct interviews with her nipples poking through her shirt, but the men’s jeans are so long she has to roll the cuffs like three times, and together with one of Peter’s dress shirts, it makes her look like a kid dressed up in dad’s clothes. She cinches the red belt high around her waist, winces as it irritates her bite wound, shoves her FBI hat on over the mess of her hair, and figures it’s really not going to get any better than that. Back out in the room, she mugs Peter for his coat so she can hide her sidearm underneath, shoves her feet back in her tripping-hazard boots, and takes the car keys before he can argue.

The Gather pack inhabit a huge lodge-style house at the top of a rolling, verdant mountain. There’s only one way up, a dirt road that passes a camouflaged security camera every hundred meters, and the rental sedan jostles around so much, gravel and branches pinging off the undercarriage, that Stiles figures Peter’s probably going to get stuck with an extra charge for cleaning and repair. It’s a fifteen minute drive up the mountain from the main road, and Peter spends the whole time scanning the classified case files on Stiles’s laptop, his reading glasses perched low on his nose, that characteristic crease between his eyebrows that means he’s focused on absorbing and understanding new information. Stiles scans the radio looking for a station that gets more music than static; by the time they reach the mountaintop, she’s convinced such a station doesn’t exist.

There’s someone waiting for them when they pull into the gravel lot in front of the lodge, a man who looks like he stepped out of a Paul Bunyan picture book. “Beta,” Stiles mutters. Peter nods in agreement. Stiles turns off the engine, and they get out, hands deliberately left out of pockets as they approach.

“Afternoon,” Stiles calls, when it becomes clear the beta’s not going to do anything but stand at the top of the porch steps looking intimidating. “I’m Special Agent Stilinski with the FBI. We’re investigating a series of murders in the area; do you mind if I ask you a couple questions?”

“What’s a fed doing with a wolf?” the man demands, hostile.

Stiles feels Peter tense behind her. “She’s pack,” he says. “Couldn’t let her come alone.”

The beta stares them down for another minute, taking their temperature. Then he nods once, and leads the way into the lodge. Peter sticks close to Stiles’s side on their way through, like having his clothes on and his scent all over her isn’t enough to claim her as his, like he needs to aim not-so-subtle glares at every wolf they encounter just to drive the point home. And there are a lot of wolves, here; the Gather pack is a big one. Stiles counts twenty-two wolves in the lodge alone, and has no doubt that there are more roaming the woods outside, or at their day jobs in town, or at home with their human families. Considering the amount of territory the pack claims, she’s not really surprised, but she _is_ a little bit intimidated in the face of it—all she has is herself and Peter, and though it’s certainly a lot better than nothing, it won’t be enough if things come to claws and fangs. She tries to calm the nervous stutter of her heartbeat, knowing that everyone can hear it and not wanting to let on how on-edge she is, but judging by Peter’s hand on the small of her back, she fails.

Eventually they end up in an industrial kitchen, where Chastity Gather is covered in flour and kneading what looks like pizza dough with the sort of accute focus that suggests this is all some sort of anger management therapy. She blows a wavy chunk of salt and pepper hair out of her eyes to look at them as they enter. “Let me guess,” she says, in lieu of greeting. “It’s about that pesky vampire.”

“How’d you know?” Stiles asks, impressed.

“You reek,” Chastity tells her. “If you haven’t already, you’ll have turned by morning.”

Stiles feels all the blood drain out of her body, which she guesses is fitting, in an ironic sort of way. “Right,” she says, and swallows. “Look, we want to catch this guy before he does to anyone else what he did to me. If there’s anything you can tell me that might help our investigation…”

“I recognize you.” Chastity slaps her dough aside and wipes her hands off on her apron, looking past Stiles to Peter, who’s holding himself with the care of a hen trying not to get noticed in a foxhole. “Yes, I recognize you,” and she bustles past them out of the kitchen into a side room that’s a cross between a home office and a rare book library, where she heaves a great tome marked USA 1990 down off a shelf above her head and flips through it sharply until she comes to the page she’s looking for. She turns it around on the desk, and Stiles realizes it’s a photo album, full of eight and a half by eleven inch glossies of smiling men and women in groups of four and five and eleven. Peter makes a barely audible sound as he looks at the page, and Stiles stares over his shoulder but still doesn’t quite get it until Chastity says, “You’re Talia’s brother. From the Hale pack.”

Stiles isn’t equipped to recognize everyone in the Hale family photo, but she knows Talia and a gangly pre-teen Laura and a toddler with severe black eyebrows who must be Derek. And she knows Peter. He must be fifteen or sixteen in the photo, easy and lithe in a way that’s since been lost to muscle, his windswept hair almost long enough to be gathered up in a bun, and Stiles feels the warm tug of fondness in her chest, so sudden and out of the blue that she feels like the room is spinning. Something inside her wants badly to lean on Peter’s shoulder, as if their roles have been reversed and suddenly _she’s_ the one for whom wearing his clothes and walking around in his scent isn’t enough, but she keeps it under control. She’s not sure he’d welcome the touch even if they _weren’t_ in the presence of other wolves; well, that’s a lie. She knows he would.

She’s the one who’s not sure. Who might not want that—not if she can’t keep it.

“I won’t help the FBI,” Chastity says, giving Stiles a hard look. “They’ve certainly never helped me. But Talia was a friend. You’re her pack, so I’ll help you.” The last is addressed to Peter, not to Stiles, and she notices him start to object but stops him with a hand on his arm and a significant slanting of the eyes.

Stiles waits on the porch with Paul Bunyan while Peter talks to Chastity. She trusts him to get the information they need for the case; he’s seen the files, and he knows more FBI jargon than a civilian probably should, with how often Stiles used to call him in the middle of the night at Quantico and during her first few months in the field, desperate for fresh eyes. Having Peter in there is as good as having herself in there. At least, that’s what Stiles tries to convince herself of as she paces a divot in the floorboards, kicking the hollow toe of her enormous hiking boots against the post and ignoring the beta with the childish stubbornness of a kid in timeout. It’s ten long minutes before Peter comes out the swinging screen door and practically carries her back down to the rental car, unwilling to even entertain the possibility of Stiles getting behind the wheel again.

She stares at him as they bounce down the dirt lane, kicking up a huge cloud of dust behind them. “You’re gonna have to tell me what she said in there. It’s my investigation, Peter.”

“She didn’t say anything about the vampire,” he answers shortly. “Nothing important, at least. Just that they can’t do anything—he hasn’t stepped foot on their land, and he hasn’t taken any of their people.”

Stiles glowers. “Come on. It didn’t take her ten minutes to say that.”

Peter remains tight-lipped for some unfathomable reason. Stiles does her best to look authoritative and pissed, but given that Peter’s known her since she was a wisecracking freshman she doesn’t think it works—at least not until he admits, “She also told me that there’s a way to keep you from turning.”

The tone of his voice makes Stiles instantly suspicious. “How?”

“It’s not a hundred percent,” Peter hedges. “It’s not a guarantee. But Chastity said it’s almost impossible for the bacteria to stay alive in your bloodstream if you’re mated to a wolf.”

Stiles knocks her skull back against the headrest, so damn tired she can’t do anything but make a soft frustrated noise in the back of her throat. “Why is it always a weird sex thing?”

“It’s not just sex,” Peter retorts, quietly. “You know it’s not just sex, Stiles. If it were, it would be—“

“Easier,” Stiles agrees, before he can say it. The atmosphere in the car is heavier than it was a second ago. Stiles scrubs a hand over her eyes, messing up her bangs, and stares out the window at the forest flashing by mere feet from their car, the cloud of dust and the thin tan line of the dirt road in the rearview. “Would you do it?” she asks without looking at him. “I mean, if it really came down to it—would you?”

“In a heartbeat,” Peter answers.

Stiles looks over then, but it’s too late; his eyes are already back on the road.

They drive the rest of the way back to the motel in a silence that isn’t quite comfortable and isn’t quite tense, like they’ve taken a long pause in the middle of a conversation and neither of them quite knows how to start it up again. Stiles takes one call from Harris; they’ve got a line on some abandoned cabins that used to be ranger’s stations back when this mountain range was covered by a state park, and they’re staking them out in case their UNSUB decides he likes the looks of one of them. Stiles makes all the right noises without really contributing anything, and when she hangs up the phone she’s thinking about how well vampires can see in the dark and how the FBI is never going to get their guy unawares by sitting and waiting. She bites her lip, watching the sun go down and the vista of the mountains turn grainy-blue, shot through with little pinpricks of yellow light where two houses are clustered together or three cars are driving in a line. There’s only one way she can think of to catch a vampire on his home turf, especially when he knows he’s being hunted.

She’s starting to feel the strange sideways wrongness that she suspects is the change coming on. Her skin seems clammy and too loose, like it’s liable to slough off her bones; there’s a tickle of nausea at the base of her throat, just under her sternum, that she suspects is going to get a lot worse before the night is out. Really, she guesses, all there is to do is be grateful that she doesn’t have to die and come back to life tied to a disgusting bed in a murder cabin. Other than that, she’ll have to knuckle through.

She needs herself as bait.

Back in the room, she flings Peter’s coat over the back of a chair and tells him, “I can’t werewolf marry you.”

For a split second Peter appears much younger than he actually is, but then the iron curtain slams down over his brief moment of hurt and he only looks determined. “You wouldn’t be obligated to me. I’d never ask for anything you didn’t want to give. We could do this now, and go back to the way things were before.”

Stiles knows he doesn’t actually believe that they could bind each other together on that fundamental, physical level and then go back to living on opposite sides of the country like it was nothing. They definitely couldn’t. From what she knows about werewolf mates, which is kind of a lot, it would be painful to be that far apart for even a few days. But that’s really not the point.

“It’s not about you, Peter,” she says. It figures that, a decade out of high school and six years out of Beacon Hills, she still has to remind dumb boys that their feelings are never the be-all end-all of any situation. “You have to know what you are to me. But there’s a killer out there targeting women and the only way to catch him is to let myself turn. Otherwise he won’t come back for me.”

“So that’s the plan? You’re going to ruin the rest of your life just to catch one perp?”

It’s not a wholly unreasonable argument, but Stiles hears in it the echo of every man who ever told her she cared too much, that she was too emotional, and also one asshole guest lecturer at Quantico who expressed the belief that she was “too pretty to spend the rest of her life in a G-man suit.”

She sees red. “It’s my _job,_ Peter. And on top of that it’s a fair fucking swap—my life for however many dozens of victims he’s going to rack up if I let him keep going.”

“Fine, Stiles,” Peter snaps. “ _Fine.”_

He snatches his jacket up and storms out of the room without slowing to put it on. Stiles stands in the echo of the door slamming, frozen until she hears the car engine start up outside, at which point she rushes over to the curtains and looks out just in time to see Peter reverse wildly out onto the road.

“Shit,” she mutters, and has to back up and sit down hard on the bed, staggered by a violent swell of mixed emotions: cold fear that she’s going to have to do this alone, anger that she wants the crutch so badly, and stupid, irrational grief, because she’d actually started hoping in some subconscious corner of her psyche that Peter was going to stick around for a while. Then the swell turns into a deeply aggressive lurch of nausea, and she barely makes it to the toilet before she’s vomiting up a hot, metallic slop of blood and bile. She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and Peter’s shirtsleeve comes away stained crimson; there’s enough blood that Stiles thinks she should be worried about dying, at least until she remembers that that’s the point of this all. She’s going to die tonight, and she’s going to do it alone.

After another couple rounds of vomiting—and, honestly, how is all this blood getting into her stomach to come up out of her throat?—she starts shivering so badly that she can hear her teeth clacking together, like her skeleton’s laughing at her on its way to total control. Stiles turns on the shower as hot as it will go and manages to strip down to Peter’s boxers and undershirt before tumbling herself unceremoniously into the cracked yellow tub. Her chest hurts like it does when she cries, really _cries_ , but with all the water she can’t tell whether there are actually tears in her eyes, or if this is just another effect of the vampiric bacteria: total emotional sundering. Her phone is out in the room. She considers, in feverish turns, calling her dad, calling Scott, calling Derek and reminding him how he owes her for that thing in Mexico, calling Lydia and doing everything she tells her to do, calling Peter and promising she’ll werewolf marry him if he’ll just come back and hold her like he used to do in those tender cut-open hours after a fight, when he’d show up at her dark empty house and let her insist over and over that she didn’t need him, saying _uh-huh_ and stationing himself on the couch until she gave up pretending she had something to do in the kitchen and went to be coaxed into his lap.

She waits for the mouth full of fangs and the gnawing hunger, but it doesn’t come. This, she figures, is the dying part. The hunger will be her reward if she manages to claw her way back to life.

Distantly, she’s aware of someone pounding on the door.

_Dad,_ she thinks nonsensically, and then, _shit, he can’t find me like this._

Then she blinks and shoves her bangs out of her face, looking around the bathroom. There are smeared, watery handprints of blood all over the tile and the cabinets and the crumpled pile of Peter’s clothes, and she has a brief moment of clarity in which she realizes the person at the door is probably either Fawn or Harris or O’Donnell, and none of them can find her like this either. Someone’s calling her name, muffled from outside ( _Stiles,_ she doesn’t realize, not _Stilinski_ ); she tries to stand up and slips back down into the wet tub with a thump that would be painful if she wasn’t way past the point of feeling things like bumps and bruises. There’s a crash, and a noise like wood splintering, and then Peter’s calling her name from inside, sharp and alarmed.

“In here,” she tries to say. It comes out as more of a croak; all that puking has not been kind to her larynx.

Peter steps into the bathroom in full byronic regalia. Stiles is so relieved she starts laughing, or starts crying, it’s hard to say. “Where did you go?” she demands, as Peter moves her soiled clothes out of the way with his foot and shuts off the freezing shower spray. “I thought you left. I thought you left me.”

“I had to get blood.” Peter yanks a dry towel down off the rack and wraps it around her head and shoulders. “I’m sorry. I should’ve told you where I was going.”

“I don’t forgive you,” Stiles grumbles. “I’m never going to forgive you.”

Peter smiles sadly at her. “That’s okay.”

Stiles would like to say that he only helps her out of the tub, but really he picks her up, bridal-style, and sets her down on the closed toilet seat. He shucks off his coat and shoes, tossing them out into the room, and she lets him peel off her soaking underthings— _his_ soaking underthings—revealing pebbled skin and her small tits with frozen, rock-hard nipples, her bush that she hasn’t had time to tend to and her legs that she hasn’t had time to shave, and Stiles has literally never felt less attractive but also has literally never given so few fucks. Peter dries her off, lifting her arms for her, scrubbing her hair, cleaning the blood gently from between her toes, silent the whole time except for when Stiles says, _I’m scared_ , and he pauses with her ankle in his hand and looks up at her with the exact same expression Stiles’s dad used to wear when her mom woke up in the hospital, sad and afraid and trying to hide it all, and tells her, _You’re not alone._

He doesn’t say he’s not going to let anything happen to her, because he can’t. Not tonight.

Stiles zones out for a while, and when she comes back to awareness she’s laying on her side in bed, swaddled in what must be Peter’s pajamas, watching sideways over the mountain ridges of the pillow as he shoves the wood dresser the TV was on in front of the door. The latch is broken, splintered; the door flaps in the breeze until Peter maneuvers the dresser into place. The TV sits on the table amid the detritus from the deli, playing the same channel that Stiles found baseball on last night, a low volume infomercial about something that’s supposed to let you cook eggs and bacon and toast all at the same time. Peter must have turned it on. He must have remembered those early days after the Nogitsune, when silence drove Stiles into a panic.

He climbs into bed without making her ask him to, just like he used to show up at her house without making her ask. He doesn’t lay down, but props himself against the headboard, between Stiles and the door, and sinks his hand in her hair when she wriggles weakly over to bury her face in his abdomen. This close, he smells like pack even to her normal human nose—which isn’t going to be normal or human for much longer—and with her eyes closed, the aroma almost carries her back to the Hale house, the preserve, lazy weekend mornings that turned into weekend afternoons when there were no monsters to slay and everything was almost easy. Her head moves up and down with the motion of Peter’s breaths, and she loops her arms around his waist and curls closer to him, desperate for that sign of life while the cold of rigor mortis sets in at the balls of her feet.

“I wasn’t sure if you cared about me anymore,” she says, finishing a thought from more than twelve hours ago. “I never really understood why you cared about me in the first place.”

“Neither did I,” Peter admits. “But it doesn’t seem like something that’s ever going away.”

“Good.” Stiles tightens her hands in the back of his shirt. “Me neither. Me too.”

After that, things get really dicey really fast. It’s only a few minutes before Stiles stops being able to move her legs; they feel like they’re frozen in a block of ice, and she doesn’t say anything until the situation reaches her waist and her bladder is suddenly empty, at which point she says _Fuck!_ a lot and not much else, using her anger to stave off embarrassed tears as Peter gets up and strips the sheets and goes out to break into the empty room next door and steal theirs. Stiles manages to change her own pants, lifting herself on shaking, exhausted arms, but by the time Peter gets back the paralysis has set in at her hands and she’s starting to panic, face flushed, wheezing thin breaths and trying to figure out whether her heartbeat is speeding up or slowing down without being able to take her own pulse. Peter dumps the clean sheets on the floor, kicks the dresser back in front of the door haphazardly, and scrambles up onto the bare mattress to hold her while she dies.

She doesn’t remember much of dying. She remembers burrowing her cold nose into the hot skin of Peter’s neck, tasting something rancid on the back of her tongue, and the strange sensation of knowing her heart had stopped but still being aware, for a second, of someone on TV trying to sell her cubic zirconium earrings.

She doesn’t know what she saw when she was dead; Peter tells her, later, when she finds the right angle to force the raw, vulnerable truth out of him, that she was limp in his arms for at least a minute before she gasped back to (undead) life. All Stiles remembers is the earrings, and then some supernatural force searing through her like a match had been struck, ripping her back into the land of the living.

“—iles,” Peter is saying, when her eyes fly open. “Stiles, fuck, come on.”

She grabs on _hard_ to his forearm. In the morning, she’ll realize she actually left bruises on his skin—she’s strong enough, now, to do that—but now Peter just picks her up and moves her down onto the floor, so he can reach the ice bucket he left on top of the AC unit. He fumbles it; ice goes spilling all over the carpet, slippery bags of blood sliding over it like dead fish, and Stiles realizes that she can _smell_ it, metallic and a tinge sour, like it’s just starting to go bad, and moreover that it smells really fucking appetizing.

“I really don’t want to eat that,” is the first thing she says with her reborn vampire voice, which sounds the same as her regular old human voice. “But also, I really want to eat that. Fuck, I’m hungry.”

Peter laughs in a way that sounds like it hurts, presses a kiss to the top of her head, and gets her a blood bag.

Stiles realizes she has fangs when she bites down on the artificial-tasting plastic of the blood bag and her incisors elongate and go right through it. Blood floods into her mouth, salty and a lot thicker than she would’ve imagined. She gets some on her chin, but at this point she has the presence of mind to make motions for the deli napkins on the table, and when Peter sighs and goes to get her one, to use it to clean herself up. Just because she’s an undead creature of the night doesn’t mean she has to eat like a slob. The napkin smells like salami, and it turns her stomach, which forces her into the awful realization that she wasted her last encounter with human food on a sub-par hoagie and a bag of sour cream and onion potato chips.

When she’s emptied the blood bags, she tries to help Peter re-make the bed and gets shoved unceremoniously down into a chair. There’s a televangelist on TV now, extolling the manifold benefits of giving huge donations to his megachurch, and Stiles has some time to wonder what the hell kind of channel this is, with baseball and infomercials and David Miscavige-looking assholes on at—what time is it, even? barely even midnight?—before the bed is made and the siren song of long uninterrupted sleep drags her across the room and face-first into the pillows. She’s asleep almost immediately.

The morning brings local news, a hell of a headache, and seven missed calls from Harris.

Stiles groans and buries her face in Peter’s shoulder, ignoring the ringing until it stops, and then not ignoring it when it starts ringing again. Even if she’s just had one of the top ten worst nights of her life, maybe even top five, she’s still an FBI agent and there’s still a serial killer on the loose. She reaches across Peter—just now waking up, languid and catlike and totally unashamed of the morning wood Stiles can feel pressed against her hip—and snags her cell phone off the bedside table in time to answer, “Stilinski.”

“ _About fucking time,”_ Harris snaps over the line. “ _Get your ass down to the police station. We’ve got the bastard pinned down in a ten mile radius, we need you to help us flush him out.”_

“Yeah,” Stiles starts to say, but he’s already hung up.

She drops the phone back on the nightstand, but doesn’t stop laying all over Peter. It’s nice to feel his heartbeat against her sternum, now that she can no longer feel her own. Peter must be thinking along similar lines, because he slides a hand into her hair and tugs her forehead down to rest against his, his nose pressed sideways into her cheek. “I can’t hear you,” he murmurs. “I’m going to have to get you a bell.”

“God, fuck off.” Stiles shoves out of bed and goes to brush her teeth.

Her fangs retracted sometime in the night; luckily, it seems like they only pop out when she needs them. Her skin has lost almost all its color, sickly-pale, almost translucent, but she figures it’s nothing that can’t be explained away with some sort of obscure blood disorder and a steady supply of liquid foundation. Peter comes in while she’s trying to wrassle her hair into a braid, bites a kiss into the side of her face, and then pops the lid on the toilet. Stiles stares at the ceiling while he empties his bladder and laments the fact that they’ve somehow skated right past the romantic portion of their relationship to the point where they’re pushing forty and argue about what color to paint the crown molding and only have sex on special occasions; laments it, until she realizes that they’ve only gotten to this point because they’ve essentially already lived through ten odd years of what amounts to a partnership deeper than marriage.

“Peter,” she says, to the waterstain directly overhead. “Can you werewolf marry a vampire?”

He flushes the toilet. “Are you proposing?”

Stiles would blush if she could. Instead she just says, “Nevermind. We’ll talk about it later,” and leaves.

The police station, when they pull into the parking lot, Fawn trailing them in her black and white, is abuzz with the sort of frantic activity Stiles has always associated with medical emergencies and statewide manhunts. O’Donnell descends on her like a hawk the second Stiles is out of the car, and Stiles barely has time to shoot Peter a look that says _hang back_ before she’s being hustled into the command center—a surveillance van with its side doors open and its technological guts spilled out in a white tent.

“Stilinski!” Harris barks, like she’s a student who’s late for class. “Get over here.”

He climbs inside the van, scares out a couple of tech grubs, and beckons Stiles impatiently inside. The second she’s in, he slides the door closed behind her, shutting out the noise of the local sheriff complaining loudly about jurisdiction to a beleaguered legal attaché. Harris gives Stiles a quick and dirty rundown of how they tracked their UNSUB to the ten mile radius the next valley over, a massive operation which seems to have involved interviewing every living thing in Montana and requisitioning a satellite that’s usually used to track the migratory patterns of bighorn sheep, and then says, like Nixon begging White House counsel for a third option, “If we have to comb the woods, we’ll lose people. Tell me you have another way.”

“I have another way,” Stiles tells him.

She only has about five seconds, in between the chaos of getting set up with a wire and a tracking device and a back-up tracking device, to pull Peter aside—identifying him to O’Donnell as her “consultant” and somehow avoiding having to identify him to anyone higher on the food chain at all—and to slip him an extra earpiece and tell him that he better be tailing her from a close distance, because no one else here has a snowball’s chance in hell of getting close enough to help her without tipping off the vampire.

“Yeah,” he says, impatient, and then when she turns to walk away, “ _Stiles_ ,” and pulls her back around the corner of the station building to crowd her against the cinderblocks and give her a kiss that makes her feel like her brain is melting out of her ears. He presses his thigh forward against the crotch of his own jeans, and Stiles knows how crazy it must be driving him, as a wolf, to have her in his clothes, but it’s really not fair of him to turn her on like this when she has to go out and run around in the woods with a psycho killer in T-minus ten minutes, so she puts her hands on his shoulders and pushes just enough to get some space between their bodies.

“Later.” She’s close enough that she can count his eyelashes, so it comes out sort of breathy and girlish, and she has to underline it with another shove. “Later, Peter, when we have time.”

The last thing that happens before she’s spirited away and dumped in the forest is that Fawn jogs up to her with a bottle of sunscreen and tells her she looks like she’s burning. “Huh,” Stiles says, “thanks.”

She’s not sure what to be afraid of, once she’s alone.

It’s not like she can be afraid of dying anymore, not now that she’s already dead. But their serial killer has been murdering his victims for good somehow, and she knows that vampires can be hurt—with wood stakes, with holy water, with crucifixes—so hiking the pre-determined path through the forest, up the side of a steep hill, making as much noise as possible to draw the UNSUB to her, she’s definitely afraid of something.

Running around in the woods with supernatural creatures is a familiar routine to fall into, and as Stiles makes her way deeper and deeper, listening to the birds and the rustling of the breeze in the canopy and her own automatic unnecessary breaths, she can’t help but remember that very first night, her and Scott fumbling idiotically through the preserve, looking for the body of a dead girl. Peter had been the monster in the dark, then—Peter, who’s now tailing her like a fiercely protective nightmare—and Stiles wonders what her younger self, with her band tees and flannels and nails painted with white out, would think if she could see her now, running headfirst into danger and pretty much resolved to spend the rest of her life with someone whose favorite pastimes used to include lurking in the preserve and threatening her friends and turning unsuspecting teenagers into werewolves. Probably she wouldn’t be too surprised; for as long as Peter has been low-key stalkerish she’s been equally obsessed in return, first in the interest of self-preservation, later in the interest of how good it felt to have his eyes on her every time she entered a room. Stiles really hasn’t changed that much.

She nearly wipes out down the mountain at least twelve times before she notices she’s being followed. She’s not sure whether this guy is excessively stupid or just excessively cocky, whether he thinks that her showing up in the woods like this is just stunningly good luck or knows it’s a trap and doesn’t give a shit. It’s strange to panic without a heartbeat, but Stiles does, and she mutters, “Peter,” into her wire.

There’s no way for him to say anything back, but she feels better anyways, making contact.

And then she climbs up into a clearing, a wide-open space between the end of this slope and the start of another, hearing the barely-audible sounds of the vampire crunching through dry leaves behind her, and knows with a gut lurch of awful certainty that she’s going to have to run.

_“Peter,”_ she says again, louder, more urgently, and takes off.

Stiles has never been a particularly good runner; most of the running she does is driven by necessity and terror, with a monster on her tail or a perp fleeing in front of her. It’s a thirty-second deal, a minute tops, and then she’s either rolling on the ground trying to get to her service weapon or she’s standing at the end of an alley with her hands on her knees, panting and calling it in. She’s not prepared for the sudden burst of speed she feels when she sprints away from the treeline—turns out being a vampire has its perks—but the man chasing her is. This is what he wants, the thrill of hunting prey that can actually give him a run for his money, and as she speeds away from him, rocks and bare black trees and startled birds streaking past her in blurs of color, Stiles knows that whatever ideas she had about the FBI catching this guy are even dumber than she originally thought, because to even imagine a normal human trying to keep up with them is laughable.

Peter, luckily, isn’t a normal human. Stiles spots him when she reaches the next slope and trips; the vampire grabs her with a snarl and throws her back into the clearing, far enough that when Stiles lands she’s pretty sure she breaks every bone in her body. She rolls over onto her back, dazed, sees Peter running toward her across the open ground with his trench whipping out behind him, hears him yell, “Stiles!” and looks back the other way just in time to scramble desperately out of the way as the fucking vampire dives for her again.

He’s got a syringe in his hand, no doubt whatever drug he uses to kill his victims, the one that didn’t show up on any of their tox screens, and Stiles is still flat on her back and Peter’s not going to make it, so she pulls her gun out of her holster and empties the clip into the guy’s neck, thinking _day one shit._

It’s not enough to keep him down, but it stops him up for a second, gurgling bloodlessly in the cold morning air, and then Peter crashes into him like a fucking freight train, and by the time Stiles reloads her clip and gets to her feet, Peter’s got the syringe and he’s jamming it into the vampire’s eye.

Once the UNSUB is dead, there’s a long minute of silence, broken only by the rustling leaves and the heavy, angry sound of Peter’s breathing, slowing as he comes down off of his bloodlust. His eyes find Stiles, glowing alpha red, and she holds his gaze until they go back to normal, until his claws retract and his brow smooths out. Then he drops the vampire’s limp body, brushes a hand gently through Stiles’s hair as he passes, and disappears back into the woods. Stiles pulls her wire out of her shirt. “He’s dead. I got him.”

The official story is that she wrestled the syringe out of the perp’s grip and stuck him with it; she wipes it down to get rid of Peter’s fingerprints, then goes back and puts hers and the dead guy’s all over it while the FBI are still trying to make their way up the mountain. Harris, who’s never been as stupid or as blind as Stiles likes to delude herself he is, pulls her aside and tells her in no uncertain terms that if she ever brings an independent party into one of his investigations again without at least notifying him, he’ll have her badge. Stiles agrees happily and by rote, floating in the heady relief that always accompanies the sudden neutralization of danger, and then goes off to repeat her fake story to three different agents, the attaché from legal, one man from the local police, and once Fawn is employed to drive her back to the station, a Bureau psychologist who arrived in Montana suspiciously fast and asks her lots of questions that boil down to, _Did you discharge your service weapon with murderous intent?_ to which Stiles responds with a resounding and extraordinarily dishonest, “No.”

When she finally emerges back into daylight, nearly six hours later, Fawn’s waiting for her in the parking lot. It makes Stiles feel warm inside, but Peter’s sitting on the other side of the parking lot on the front of his rental car, so she only shakes Fawn’s hand andtells her that if she ever needs help from the FBI, she can call and ask for Special Agent Stilinski. “I hope I never have to call you,” Fawn says emphatically, and then, “I mean, shit, not that you aren’t great, just because this whole thing was a huge nightmare.”

“I get it,” Stiles says. “Seriously, if anyone gets it, it’s me. Still.”

Fawn nods, relieved, and Stiles watches her go back into her quiet little sheriff’s station that will hopefully never again see as much action as it did in the last few days.

Then she goes to Peter. His eyes stay on her the whole way across the parking lot, and when she gets close enough he hooks her by her red ring belt and reels her in to stand between his spread legs, slides a hand into her back pocket— _his_ back pocket—and gives her a look which says he regrets every decision he has made to get him to this point, but which is also endlessly, helplessly fond. Stiles goes up on her toes, plastering her body all over the front of his, and kisses him.

He breathes her name against her mouth, almost reverent, and kisses her back with an odd mix of caution and desperation, like he’s been given something that he’s afraid is going to be taken away and wants to get the most out of it while he still has it. Stiles, who proposed not twelve hours ago after dying and coming back to life in his arms, thinks that’s inexcusably stupid, so she grabs the lapels of his leather coat and slows everything down, her lips and her hands and the cadence of her breathing, until he’s just holding her and keeping their lips together, peaceful and unhurried. She tilts her mouth away, so their foreheads knock together, and says, “Do you think we need condoms, now that I’m undead?”

Peter grins, gaze still stuck on her lips. “Definitely not.”

“Because, yeah, a werewolf-vampire hybrid baby would be super cool, but I’m kind of focusing on my career.”

“Okay,” Peter says, exasperated. “We’ll stop for condoms.”

It starts raining while Peter’s in the CVS. Stiles sinks down in the passenger seat, insulated by the sound of rain on the roof and the smeary waterfall of it on the windshield, and can’t resist the urge to grind the heel of her hand against herself, pressing the hard zipper of Peter’s fly in exactly the right spot to make herself gasp, make the inseam of Peter’s boxers and the tops of her thighs damp. Peter runs out the sliding glass doors holding the plastic bag over his head, wrestles with the locked driver’s side door for a second, then thumps down into the seat, spritzing her with water, and tosses a brochure into her lap. She picks it up and sees a pink and white cross surrounded by cartoon doves, registers that it says _The Joy of Christian Marriage_ just as Peter tells her, “The nice woman at the register wanted me to know I don’t have to live in sin.”

Stiles laughs. “Just for that, I feel like we should do it where the security cameras will see.”

Peter’s eyes darken with lust, but in the end they make it a whole five miles down the road before he pulls over into a viewing area and removes Stiles’s hand from his crotch. He can smell that she touched herself while he was in the store—she knows he can—and her stomach swoops with dizzying, ecstatic exhiliration as he brings her palm to his face and takes a deep breath, drinking in the smell of her. “Fuck, Stiles,” he rumbles, “you’re going to be the death of me, you know that?”

Stiles yanks her hand away from him, gets out of the car, and dives back into the back seat a second later, wet with rainwater. Peter joins her a moment later, and it’s cramped back here, it’s a sedan, neither of them can stretch their legs out fully, but it doesn’t matter; what matters is Peter scrambling around to get out of his trench, Stiles kicking off her oversized hiking boots, planting one socked foot on the floor and one up on the seat as Peter finally shakes loose of his right sleeve and surges forward to mouth at her neck, at her sternum under the open collar of his own dress shirt, her knee bent and pressed between his side and the seat back, his cold hand sliding up beneath his own undershirt to find her breast, the hard pebble of her nipple. She sneaks her hands down the back of his jeans and grabs his bare ass, digging her nails in, and Peter growls against her throat, hips shocking forward in a rough, involuntary thrust; his dick hits her in that exact right spot, and she swears, feeling his boxers get even wetter against her cunt—which, if the press of teeth against the swell of her breast and the way he tells her he’s going to bury himself _so fucking deep inside_ her is any indication, he can smell, too.

“Do it, then,” Stiles taunts, delirious with joy.

The red belt, in the end, gives them a great deal of grief. It ends up discarded in the footwell of the passenger seat, tossed down with the sort of vague petty anger of trying to flick a piece of gum off your finger into a trash can.

Once they get through the ordeal of getting Stiles’s pants off, Peter doesn’t even bother with his, just yanks his zipper, shoves everything down to his knees, and settles back between her legs, bumping up against the bare heat of her, slipping inside once, slick and good and unimpeded, before they both remember the condoms and he has to fish around in the plastic bag, rip the cardboard box open with his teeth and rip a condom open the same way. It takes so long—ten seconds, at least—that Stiles almost breaks and tells him to forget it, but he’s rolling the condom on, holding himself over her one-handed, and almost before he’s done he shifts forward and spears her open, dropping his face into her shoulder, like the feeling is enough to unman him completely. Stiles takes his head in her hands and kisses the side of his face, his eyes, his mouth, the tip of his nose, everywhere she can reach, until Peter breathes out once, long and low, kisses her almost chastely, and starts to move.

Later, after they fog up the windows and the rain stops and they make it back to their ruined motel room, he’ll bury his face between her legs and she’ll box his ears with her thighs when she comes and, laying next to her with her slick still on his chin, he’ll tell her he’d happily go deaf if he could eat her out every day for the rest of his life. Stiles, for some reason more emotionally moved by that statement than any before it, will tell him that if he doesn’t come back to Quantico with her she’s going to kill him, and he’ll laugh and say that he’s flattered, no one’s ever been that desperate for his mouth before, and she’ll beg him tiredly to shut up and he will, smug and sated for all of five minutes before the proprietor of the Blue Mountain View finally gets around to banging on the door and telling them he’s going to charge them extra for property damage.

“Property damage,” Peter echoes, like the very idea is offensive—and Stiles laughs, and laughs.


End file.
